Hasta La Gadget!

When I turned 10, I was finally allowed to own a pen. At school, that was when we moved from pencils to ink, and our parents were told to get us all-new stationery. That was also the year we learned to write in cursive, because we were finally big kids and cursive writing meant we could… sign checks, I guess.

I don’t know about kids these days, but physically writing notes in pen and paper is a huge part of how I learned things and organized my thoughts. It probably had something to do with the fact that my mom trained my brother and I to use “mind maps” as study tools, too. When I start planning a trip or a big project, I instinctively reach for a notepad and a pen. That’s why writing on a tablet that mimics this experience holds so much appeal for me (and probably a lot of people around my age or older).

Though you can get a decent stylus experience on an iPad, Surface or Galaxy device, e-ink tablets typically last a lot longer and offer a more paper-like reading experience with no glare or blue light hurting your eyes. They also typically don’t come with distracting apps or notifications to interrupt your work. So when Amazon announced the Kindle Scribe would be its first e-reader that would support stylus input, I was intrigued. The Kindle series are probably the most popular e-ink readers in the US, and they could make digital note taking much more accessible to a mainstream audience.

At $340, however, the Scribe is the most expensive Kindle. For that premium, you’ll get a bigger 10.2-inch screen with the same 300ppi pixel density, a front light with 35 LEDs, an included Basic Pen and at least 16GB of storage. You can sync your notes to the Kindle app to view them without the tablet. But while e-readers never fully replaced books, the Scribe might just offer a better experience than an actual pen and notepad.

Design and hardware

Like most Kindles, the Scribe is marvelously thin and light. At just 0.22 inches thick, this is one of the slimmest e-readers around, and I actually worried it might break when I left it in the flimsy purse I threw into an overhead compartment during my Thanksgiving flight to San Francisco. Luckily, with the case that Amazon sent along, the Scribe not only survived being tossed around with heavy suitcases, it also held up when I accidentally sat on it. (Yes, I’m a monster who’s too rough with gadgets.)

More importantly, at just 433 grams or 0.95 pounds, the Scribe was light enough for long periods of reading. It’s just a hair lighter than the M1 iPad Air, which weighs 1.02 pounds, and thanks to a generous bezel on the long side, the Scribe is easy to hold with one hand without accidentally triggering the touchscreen. Because the display rotates to all orientations, you can use this with your right or left hand.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Unlike the Oasis or some e-reader models by Kobo, the Scribe doesn’t have physical buttons for page turning. There’s just a single power button on the edge next to the USB-C charging socket. It’s also worth noting that, again, unlike the Oasis and Paperwhite models, the Scribe is not water-resistant.

As a notebook

In many ways, the Scribe offers a better experience than actual pen and paper. I never run out of paper or ink or have to sharpen a pencil. Erasing my mistakes is effortless, I don’t have to deal with cleaning up eraser dust, and I never end up with ink or lead stains on my hands. Amazon’s palm rejection here is almost perfect, other than when I drag it across the screen, which turned the page. That didn’t happen often enough to be annoying, and I quickly learned to not move my palm when resting it on the display.

I loved the sheer smoothness of writing on the Scribe. The latency is nearly zero, and the instant I placed the nib on the screen, it left a mark. Thanks to the screen’s matte finish and responsiveness, drawing on the Scribe felt just as natural as the real thing. The Premium Pen that Amazon sent with our review unit has a shortcut button and dedicated eraser at the top. Flipping the pen over to undo mistakes felt natural, but more importantly it was just as smooth as inking. Of course, since it’s a much larger target than the stylus’ nib, the eraser isn’t as precise, but the deleted marks on the screen fade in a satisfying way.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

The one thing that took away from the Scribe being a full replica of a notepad is its screen refreshing. When you erase something, it slowly fades away and when it’s just about gone, the display refreshes itself quite jarringly. It’s a small quirk, but can definitely catch you off guard.

Just like pen and paper, the Scribe is limited. You can’t edit your notes on a phone or laptop after writing them. You can view them, sure, but because Amazon syncs them to the Kindle app as image files, you can’t make changes to them. You can export them as PDFs to another device and use a third-party editor to tweak your notes, but at that point you might as well use Evernote or Samsung Notes.

Amazon’s software doesn’t offer this function though, and compared to competing note-taking apps for iOS, Android and Windows, the Scribe’s features are very rudimentary. It doesn’t even do handwriting recognition to convert your scrawl to machine-readable text, meaning it also can’t index anything you’ve jotted down so you can search your notes by keywords later.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Still, that doesn’t mean the device isn’t a delight. I loved using the Scribe as a notepad for my many lists. You can start notebooks using various backgrounds — a simple lined pattern, or checkboxes to keep track of tasks or shopping items. I spent my week or so with the Scribe organizing my holiday shopping lists, planning a family vacation, drawing tropical fruits that my friends haven’t heard of and refamiliarizing myself with writing the Japanese alphabet (hiragana). I felt more productive and organized when I had the Scribe with me, and almost lost when I needed to jot down a thought and it wasn’t by my side.

For my purposes, the Scribe was perfectly adequate. But for others who might need a more sophisticated note-taking system, Amazon’s device is seriously lacking. A bio-medical engineering professor I spoke to who was keen on using the Scribe to annotate notes and research articles, for example, was disappointed to learn the device didn’t support colors. You can only highlight in grayscale. If you’re looking to create works of art, you won’t find a complete toolkit in Amazon’s app — just a pencil with a few thickness options or a highlighter. And unlike on an iPad, you can’t move portions of your drawings around just by dragging and dropping them with your stylus.

Creating a notebook isn’t the only way you can doodle on the Kindle Scribe, by the way. You can also take down notes when you’re reading an e-book. But it’s not like you can scribble directly onto the words of your e-books. You can use the floating toolbox to create a sticky note, then draw within a designated rectangle. When you close the sticky note, a small symbol appears over the word it was attached to, but otherwise, your scribbles are hidden. No annotating in the margins here.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Like I said, Amazon’s software is rudimentary. Still, if you think about the Scribe primarily as a blank writing pad that replaces all your loose pieces of paper as opposed to a sophisticated notes management system, then it’ll still serve a purpose.

The Pen

A large component of the Scribe experience is the pen. The Premium Pen I received costs $30 more, and adds a dedicated eraser and shortcut button along the edge. Both the Basic and pricier pens snap magnetically to the edge of the Scribe and don’t need to be charged, which is nice. The stylus stays securely attached to the tablet, thanks to the strong magnets, though you can remove it without too much force. I did find the shortcut button on the Premium Pen a little too easy to accidentally trigger, since it’s placed right where my thumb or index finger would rest. I frequently had to remind myself to turn the stylus so I wouldn’t press it by mistake.

Amazon’s Premium Pen is about the same size as an Apple Pencil or Samsung’s larger S Pen for tablets and reminiscent of a real pen. Anecdotally, it actually felt more comfortable than Apple’s stylus, possibly due to a touch of malleability in its body.

As an e-reader

It’s no surprise that the Scribe shines as an e-reader. It may be the biggest Kindle yet, but when I was reading Blackout by Erin Flanagan, words were as crisp and legible as on the smaller entry-level Kindle I’m used to. I appreciated the ability to tweak the display’s color temperature just like I would on other Kindles, and cut down on blue light near my bedtime. The front light made it possible for me to read in a dark airplane cabin, and though the Scribe was easy to see in sunlight, it did have some glare under the harsh overhead lights in our office.

Of course, thanks to the larger canvas, I could see more text on a page and didn’t have to squint. Amazon also offers Large Mode under Display Size so that those with visual impairments can read with greater ease. Other Kindle accessibility features are also available, including the VoiceView screen reader over Bluetooth audio (in English only). You can also adjust the font size, face, line spacing, margins and invert black and white.

The company also introduced a new Send to Kindle for Web tool to make it easier to transfer your personal documents from your computer to your Scribe. Basically, as an e-reader, the Scribe is everything you’ve gotten used to on a Kindle, from the excellent library of available content down to Amazon’s cumbersome interface.

This brings me to my two biggest frustrations with the Scribe, and, spoiler alert, they’re pretty minor complaints. First, I wish Amazon would update its layout to make it easier or faster to switch between notes. To go from my to-do list to my packing list, for example, I have to tap the top of the screen to invoke the navigation bar, hit the Notebooks button to view my notes, then select the list I want. That would be bothersome on a regular touchscreen, not to mention a slowly refreshing e-ink one. If Amazon let me view a carousel of my open notes by swiping from the bottom, perhaps, it might make jumping between them easier.

Cherlynn Low / Engadget

Secondly, the premium leather cover that Amazon sent with the Scribe folds into a stand, but it’s tricky to figure out how. Obviously you don’t have to buy this case, which is good since it costs an absurd $80. And the interface is slow, but works as expected and is perhaps as good as it gets for e-ink.

The best thing about black-and-white e-readers, though, is their longevity. Amazon says the Scribe will last up to 3 weeks if you write about half an hour a day. While I was concerned to see the battery level drop from 83 to 80 percent during one of my hiragana practice sprees, in my week with the device it’s gone down about 35 percent. I’d say if you weren’t writing continuously for hours, you’d get more out of the Scribe, but at the very least it easily should last you two and a half weeks.

Wrap-up

As a child of the nineties, I’m enamored with the Scribe. Amazon has managed to not only replicate a pen-and-paper experience, but without the associated limitations like running out of ink. Some of my main issues with the Scribe, particularly its lack of editing tools, are possibly solvable by software updates. And indeed, when I asked Amazon about possible handwriting recognition tools in future, a representative indicated that “While we can’t comment on future roadmap features, we are always listening to customer feedback.” So maybe if we all complain loudly enough, the company will add it.

The Kindle Scribe’s biggest competition is the Remarkable Tablet, which retails for slightly more than Amazon’s device, though you can find it on sale for less nowadays. It has a slightly larger 10.3 inch screen but comes in noticeably thinner at 4.7mm (or 0.18 inches) thick. ReMarkable offers slightly better syncing and writing software than Amazon, but it pales in comparison to the Kindle as an e-reader.

Artists, designers and serious note-takers also probably want to look elsewhere for a more sophisticated drawing and annotating solution — the iPad and Apple Pencil might be your best bet. But as a combo of an e-reader that can also serve as a basic digital notepad, the Kindle Scribe is surprisingly satisfying.

As part of its goal to have zero-emission aircraft enter service by 2035, Airbus has announced the development of a hydrogen fuel-cell engine designed for airplanes. Unlike Rolls-Royce’s recently announced jet engine that burns hydrogen directly, it would use an electric motor just like fuel-cell cars, while emitting only H20. It could eventually be employed in commercial aircraft that could carry up to 100 passengers around 1,000 nautical miles (1,150 miles), the company said.

Airbus plans to test the engine by the middle of the decade on its A380 MSN1 aircraft, “currently being modified to carry liquid hydrogen tanks,” it said. However, the technology appears to be designed for smaller, regional type aircraft that use more efficient propeller, rather than jet engines. 

“Fuel cells are a potential solution to help us achieve our zero-emission ambition and we are focused on developing and testing this technology to understand if it is feasible and viable for a 2035 entry-into-service of a zero-emission aircraft,” said Airbus VP for zero-emission aircraft, Glenn Llewellyn. 

The company didn’t provide any more details, but fuel-cells are a well-known technology for cars. They’re far less efficient than battery electric vehicles (BEVs) if you count fuel production and conversion to electricity. However, they have more range, are faster to refuel and lighter — with the latter, of course, being essential for aircraft.  

As mentioned, Rolls-Royce just announced the successful test of a jet engine powered by burning hydrogen directly, another possible technology for future air transport. The company converted a Rolls-Royce AE 2100-A, a regional aircraft engine used in turboprop commuter planes, to work with the novel fuel source. However, the tech could theoretically be scaled up for larger planes.

There are still some major hurdles to overcome before hydrogen could ever be used to power airplanes. It takes four times as much hydrogen as regular fuel by weight for the same range, and the fuel must be kept under pressure. And of course, hydrogen is highly explosive, so aircraft systems for storage and distribution would need to be extremely reliable and durable — again adding weight. Still, it might be the only option available for aircraft in the near future, as battery technology is still much too heavy unless used for very short flights.

The Fox News host continues to outdo himself.

Fusion power may be a more realistic prospect than you think. As Motherboardreports, researchers at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered that a new magnetic field setup more than tripled the energy output of the fusion reaction hotspot in experiments, “approaching” the level required for self-sustaining ignition in plasmas. The field was particularly effective at trapping heat within the hotspot, boosting the energy yield.

The hotspot’s creation involved blasting 200 lasers at a fusion fuel pellet made from hydrogen isotopes like deuterium and tritium. The resulting X-rays made the pellet implode and thus produce the extremely high pressures and heat needed for fusion. The team achieved their feat by wrapping a coil around a pellet made using special metals.

The notion of using magnets to heat the fuel isn’t new. University of Rochester scientists found they could use magnetism to their advantage in 2012. The Lawrence Livermore study was far more effective, however, producing 40 percent heat and more than three times the energy.

Practical fusion reactors are still many years away. The output is still far less than the energy required to create self-sustaining reactions. The finding makes ignition considerably more achievable, though, and that in turn improves the chances of an energy-positive fusion system. This also isn’t the end of the magnetism experiments. A future test will use an ice-laden cryogenic capsule to help understand fusion physics. Even if ignition is still distant, the learnings from this study could provide a clearer path to that breakthrough moment.

It’s been six years since Tesla, SpaceX (and now Twitter) CEO Elon Musk co-founded brain-control interfaces (BCI) startup, Neuralink. It’s been three years since the company first demonstrated its “sewing machine-like” implantation robot, two years since the company stuck its technology into the heads of pigs — and just over 19 months since they did the same to primates, an effort that allegedly killed 15 out of 23 test subjects. After a month-long delay in October, Neuralink held its third “show and tell” event on Wednesday where CEO Elon Musk announced, “we think probably in about six months, we should be able to have a Neuralink installed in a human.”

Neuralink has seen tumultuous times in the previous April 2021 status update: The company’s co-founder, Max Hodak, quietly quit just after that event, though he said was still a “huge cheerleader” for Neuralink’s success. That show of confidence was subsequently shattered this past August after Musk reportedly approached Neuralink’s main rival, Synchron, as an investment opportunity. 

Earlier in February, Neuralink confirmed that monkeys had died during prototype testing of its BCI implants at the ​​University of California, Davis Primate Center but rejected accusations by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine of animal cruelty. Musk responded indirectly to those charges on Wednesday. 

“Before we would even think of putting a device in an animal, we do everything possible we with rigorous benchtop testing, We’re not cavalier about putting these devices into animals,” he said. “We’re extremely careful and we always want the device, whenever we do the implant — whether into a sheep, pig or monkey — to be confirmatory, not exploratory.”

In July, Synchron beat Neuralink to market when doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York successfully installed the company’s inch-and-a-half long device into a person living with ALS. The patient, who has lost their ability to move and communicated independently, should be able to surf the web and send text messages using the device to translate their thoughts into computer commands. That same month, an affair Musk had with a Neuralink executive, who is now pregnant with his twins, also came to light. 

Neuralink is still working towards gaining FDA approval for its implant, though the company was awarded the agency’s Breakthrough Device Designation in July 2020. This program allows patients and caregivers more “timely access” to promising treatments and medical devices by fast tracking their development and regulatory testing. As of September, 2022 the FDA has granted that designation to 728 medical devices. 

The FDA has also updated its best practices guidance regarding clinical and nonclinical BCI testing in 2021. “The field of implanted BCI devices is progressing rapidly from fundamental neuroscience discoveries to translational applications and market access,” the agency asserted in its May guidance. “Implanted BCI devices have the potential to bring benefit to people with severe disabilities by increasing their ability to interact with their environment, and consequently, providing new independence in daily life.”

“In many ways it’s like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires,” Musk said of Neuralink’s device during the 2021 livestream event. The device relies on as many as 1,024, 5-micron diameter leads “sewn” into a patient’s grey matter to form connections with the surrounding neurons, providing high-resolution sampling of the brain’s electrical emissions and translating between analog electrical impulses and digital computer code. Theoretically, at least. So far, all Neuralink has accomplished is getting a monkey to play Pong without a joystick.

“We are all already cyborgs in a way,” Musk quipped during his opening remarks, “in that your phone and your computer are extensions of yourself.” However, those devices pose significant limitations on our ability to communicate, he argued. “If you’re interacting with a phone, it’s limited by the speed at which you can move your thumbs, or the speed at which you can talk into your phone.” He notes that this method can only transmit “tens, maybe a hundred” bits of data per second while “a computer can communicate at, you know, gigabits, terabits per second.”

“This is the fundamental limitation that I think we need to address to mitigate the long-term risk of artificial intelligence,” he said, credulously.